


tell me where is the monsoon season gentle

by hotgirl



Series: naisen [7]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Hatake Kakashi-centric, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mokuton User Haruno Sakura, Period-Typical Homophobia, Politics
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-12
Updated: 2021-01-12
Packaged: 2021-03-17 04:53:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28719174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hotgirl/pseuds/hotgirl
Summary: When you looked at this cruel child and saw the shadow of the girl that you killed, you looked away. You don’t know how to look back. — kakashi/gaior: kakashi spends three years drowning in guilt, and the world does not wait
Relationships: Dai-nana-han | Team 7 & Hatake Kakashi, Hatake Kakashi & Haruno Sakura, Hatake Kakashi/Maito Gai | Might Guy
Series: naisen [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1081791
Comments: 8
Kudos: 72





	tell me where is the monsoon season gentle

**Author's Note:**

> title comes from angela maría spring’s [do you ever think about leaving, my mother asks](https://www.muzzlemagazine.com/angela-maria-spring-1.html)
> 
> people who ship kakashi w his students dni u nasty disgusting beings. anyway this is the installment i’m most excited about so far tbh, and i hope you guys see why that is. and, yeah, we’re getting into multi-chapter parts now

You’re twenty-eight, and you haven’t spoken to the kids you vowed to protect with your life in over a year. Sasuke defected, and Naruto went with Jiraiya-sama, but Sakura lives half an hour away from you. She’s not your student anymore. None of them are.

Sometimes you wonder if Sakura ever was. You don't let yourself linger on the thought.

It’s been three months and counting since you went on a mission, and you’ve gotten several passive aggressive letters from the elder council about this. Gai has taken to checking up on you again like you’re the wreck that you were in the aftermath of Obito and Rin. You wish Kushina-sensei was here too, and you wonder if you did the right thing not telling Naruto the truth about his parents. It’s too little, too late. Just like everything else you could do for your kids.

(You think of Sasuke and all the ways that you failed to show him how loved he was or that he is so much more than what his brother did to him.)

You don't get out of bed this morning. You don't eat breakfast. You just sleep until you can't sleep anymore, and then you hear the sizzling of vegetables in your cramped kitchen. You blink yourself awake to see him—the love of your life, Gai.

He's got an apron on, and he's making you dinner. Your shitty apartment looks better than you left it; he's been here for a while. "Kakashi, my rival! Good to see you up! Put some real clothes on; dinner is almost ready!" He smiles at you, and you think you might go blind from the dazzling sight.

Finally, you force yourself out of bed. You don't let yourself think of the kids that you've failed or the teams that you've lost as you change out of your pajamas. You make your groggy way to the kitchen to wrap your arms around Gai's waist and rest your head against the safety net that is his shoulders.

"I can see that today was hard for you," he says as he turns the stove off, "but we've got to get you back in fighting shape! How else will you ever beat me again?"

The two of you eat; he speaks fondly and enthusiastically, and you listen quietly. The world feels most at peace when your stomach is full and warm with love and with food.

You still wish your kids were here to share it. You still struggle to eat more than a few bites.

Gai takes you on a walk after dinner, and the streetlights are beautiful, but you can't appreciate any of it. His hand keeps yours warm tonight, and your heart sinks even lower in your ribs.

You're supposed to be getting better.

Jiraiya-sama wrote you a while ago to update you on Naruto, and he said that the number one hyperactive knucklehead ninja was homesick, but he was getting stronger than ever. Naruto doesn't blame you, he'd added in an afterthought that broke you.

You've been speaking to Hokage-sama again after months of silence following the revelation of just how badly you had failed Sakura, and she's easier on you than you think you deserve. She says Sakura asks about you. She says the kid misses her family. She says that means you and Naruto and— 

(Sasuke must be so alone right now. Is he scared? Is he angry? Is he a shadow of the boy that you knew?)

No one is blaming you for your failures.

Why is no one blaming you for your failures?

You remember, distantly, that she had said it was the Sandaime's fault you had ever been put in that position, but you know that this is your failure and yours alone.

**/**

A month goes by, and this feeling still isn't leaving. You wonder if it's because, this time, you lost them all at once. You had barely had a month to grieve Obito before they took Rin from you too, but you had had time, and you had had months to grieve Rin before you lost Kushina-sensei too.

This time, they didn't give you time. And now you've been staring at this packaged fish for far too long.

You return from the store to find the Godaime in your home.

"Kakashi," she greets.

"Tsunade-sama… did something happen to Sakura?" you ask, shoulders tense.

"The brat's fine," she says, "but you're not." She says it like it's simple. You don't think that it's simple anymore. You're not sure if it ever was, really. That doesn't stop her from looking at you like she really sees you and continuing on, "from what I can tell the state of mental health care after... after the attack wasn't great. For anyone. Social programs got cut, and the Sandaime and the elders put funding in our shinobi and our defense budget instead. I read your file. They cleared you for ANBU duty the day after Kushina died. That never should have happened."

The little kid they broke in ANBU—the little kid who maybe never existed, to begin with—is kicking and screaming right now. You've never really talked about Kushina-sensei or Obito, and you've only just really acknowledged Rin. You can't even breach those topics with Gai. The Godaime has no right to do this to you.

“I know this is a personal matter, and we don’t have this kind of relationship, but I already scheduled an appointment with Shizune. It’s not optional. Afterwards, a Yamanaka will be going through your brain to see if there are any irregularities. Then we’ll have a diagnosis,” she tells you, “and from there, Shizune and I will determine a course of treatment for you. That’s all.”

With that, she leaves you to mope until Gai comes to check on you.

**/**

Your appointment date comes, and Gai takes you to the hospital. 

Shizune greets you and starts with your childhood. Your father. You saw a shrink after the fact, but they hadn’t put you through a full Yamanaka evaluation, and mental health protocols weren’t as advanced two decades ago. You’re nervous. You’ve fought in a war, and you’ve killed hundreds of shinobi and mercenaries and thugs alike, and you’re nervous about a psych eval.

If he wasn’t waiting for you in the lobby, Gai would hold your hand until a child asked his mother why two men would hold hands, and you let go. You’re always letting go.

You tell Shizune that.

“Do you feel like you’ve let go of Team 7?” she asks, her voice soft and kind.

You sigh. “I don’t think I let go… I think they slipped out of my reach,” you confess.

“Sakura lives a half hour away from you.”

It’s true, but it doesn’t mean she hasn’t slipped out of your reach. You don’t tell Shizune that.

“Kakashi-san,” she says quietly, “I know that they… they reminded you of Team Kushina. Do you feel like maybe you never got to grieve the loss of that team?”

“Maa… I don’t know,” you admit.

She asks you more about them, and the months after you lost them. 

You hate yourself as you remember your cruelty back then and how you were too late to change that by the time Obito was being crushed to death. You remember the feeling of Rin’s insides coating your hands and how it never quite left. You remember being asked to identify Kushina-sensei and her husband Minato’s bodies and how Kushina-sensei died with her eyes open and soulless.

She asks you about your time in ANBU, and you tell her that that information is classified.

“Kakashi-san, I need to know how it affected your mental health. You don’t have to reveal mission details, but you need to tell me how it made you feel to be fourteen in the ANBU Black Ops,” she says.

“... I still have nightmares sometimes. I wake up, and I scrub my hands, and they are never clean enough, Shizune. I’ve had my arm through so many people… I…” you can’t finish.

“You were just a boy,” she says quietly.

“… I was just a boy,” you repeat.

You spend the next hour talking about your weight and muscle loss the last few months and sleeping all day and feeling so unbelievably empty, sometimes even when Gai is holding you. Then, she sends you to Yamanaka Inoichi.

“Maa, the head of T&I himself,” you blanch, still teary-eyed.

“In the flesh, Kakashi. The Godaime wanted the best to look after you,” he responds. He tells you that this will hurt and that that is normal, and you tell him you understand.

It feels like having your head split open, but when it’s over, you have a diagnosis: depression and C-PTSD. It sounds so simple when they say it like that; you wish it was simple like that. Shizune explains that your treatment plan will be therapy-heavy but will feature medication to alleviate your depression. She apologizes for how long it took for you to get a diagnosis at all and all the years that you’ve suffered in silence. She tells you that Tsunade wants you to be put on paid leave until you’ve recovered enough to return to duty.

The whole time, Inoichi looks at you like he’s disturbed by what he saw in your head. Then, just before he leaves, he tells you that if you ever want to get a drink or something, his door is open.

You can’t believe your memories are so bad that they got to the myth of a man. You wonder what that says about your time in ANBU. About the kind of man you are that you carried out those orders.

You can’t imagine it says anything good.

Gai kisses you when you get home anyway; he says he’s proud of you.

**/**

The first day you are officially on leave, Danzō drops by.

“Kakashi-kun,” he smiles at you warmly, but there’s that tinge of coldness to it that only he has. 

You have not had what you would consider a positive relationship with Shimura Danzō. 

You first met the man when you were fourteen, three months into your time in ANBU. He had introduced himself like a friendly old man, but even then, something had been off about him. He has never been less than cordial to you, even when you failed a mission in ANBU, but you do not trust this man.

There are whispers that have followed him for years now. Whispers of a secret organization, even more classified and elite than ANBU. Whispers that he and he alone controls it. Secret police, missing people, corpses unaccounted for, human experiments, Orochimaru himself thought to have been affiliated with this organization. They are nothing more than rumors. There is no proof. There are no known records. There is nothing Danzō has ever publicly done that could deserve these rumors.

But you know Danzō.

“Danzō-san,” you force yourself to smile back, “to what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Tsunade-hime told me that you were going on leave for health problems. I wanted to drop by to wish you well. She didn’t offer many details, but I assume it’s nothing life-threatening,” he says.

“No, nothing life-threatening, Danzō-san. I’ll be back in action soon, I’m sure. Thank you for visiting,” you say evenly.

“Of course, Kakashi-kun. Have a wonderful day with that… friend of yours,” he says carefully.

You wish him well, and you wait for the cold to pass.

**/**

Tsunade-sama herself acts as your psychiatrist, monitoring your dose and making adjustments as she sees fit. When you come in to see her, she tells you how Sakura is. She tells you that she’s making remarkable progress as a medic and that she even signed the slug contract.

You tell her you had pegged Sakura as the genjutsu type once. You admit that you used her progress to motivate Naruto and…

(Sasuke. Sasuke. Sasuke. You’re getting better now, aren’t you? Why can’t you say his name?)

Your mood drops after that. She ups your dose. She tells you to try to talk to Shizune about him. “The worst thing you can do with these things is bottle them up,” she says. “I’m not just saying that as a doctor,” she adds.

You take her advice; you talk to Shizune, and you can’t say his name, but you can tell her about how his hair never sat down right and how grumpy he was first thing in the morning before Nartuo and Sakura woke up and how you watched him eat tomatoes like apples.

Before you know it, his fifteenth birthday comes and goes. 

That’s a bad day for you, just like Sakura’s fifteenth birthday was and Naruto’s fifteenth birthday will be, but you’ve made so much progress that Tsunade-sama has to hound you about taking your medication because you feel like you don’t need it most days.

The C-PTSD is harder to treat. Your nightmares are getting less frequent, but Shizune tells you one day that it might never be all the way better. She asks what your latest nightmare was.

You tell her, “I was terrified in Kuni. I had my arm through a boy like I was thirteen, killing Rin all over again, and… and Sasuke was bleeding out. I thought he was dead. I thought that was the moment I failed as a sensei.”

Shizune looks at you with sympathetic eyes and tells you that you said his name.

Two weeks later, Tsunade-sama clears you for active duty again. She wastes next to no time assigning you your first mission back.

“You’ll be working with chūnin in Kuni. They need medical assistance after an attack, and you’ll need to investigate the attack itself. Normally, Kiri would provide medical assistance and investigate their territory themselves, but they're understaffed with medic-nin, and we happen to be producing the most medic-nin of any village right now,” she explains, “oh, good, your chūnin are here. I’ve explained to them the mission already. We were just waiting for a jōnin to accept.”

You turn around and see Sakura standing with Kiba and Shikamaru. Your heart drops.

**/**

The day you set out to Kuni, you want to hear Sakura lecturing Naruto like they’re twelve-years-old again. Instead, you hear Shikamaru complaining about what a drag it is that he's been assigned to work with two of the loudest people in their graduating class.

Sakura and Kiba tell him to shut it, and you think maybe she isn’t so different after all. She begins to review standard bedside manners in Kuni with Kiba. You remember when you’d had her explain chakra to Naruto, and you’re glad that her keen memory hasn’t worsened in any way.

You say next to nothing for the first few hours of the trip. Then, Kiba and Shikamaru start to pick at you the way Team 7 used to.

“So he wears the mask ‘cause he’s ugly, right?” Kiba asks Sakura, “I mean, c’mon, he’s your sensei, you’ve gotta know how bad his mug is under that.”

“Don’t be stupid, Kiba,” Shikamaru scoffs, “if he’s that ugly, there’s no way Sakura has seen his face.”

“But you’re not saying he’s _not_ that ugly!”

“No, he’s definitely that ugly,” Shikamaru agrees.

“I wouldn’t know,” Sakura says finally, “we tried to see his face once, but he just had another mask under that mask.”

“Maa, are you still upset about that?” you ask, trying to sound casual. You want to be her sensei again.

She doesn’t respond, and the conversation dies from there. From the way Kiba wraps an arm around Sakura for a moment, and Shikamaru shoves his hands into his pockets awkwardly, you know that they both sense the tension there.

You wonder if she’s told them what a failure of a sensei you were for her. You wonder if all the kids in their class and maybe Gai’s kids too know how you neglected her as your student. You wonder if the other sensei whisper about you behind your back.

You don’t apologize. Not here. Not now.

Eventually, the kids start talking again. Kiba and Sakura joke together about how hard Hana and Tsunade-sama are working them as medics. Kiba goes on about how much he hates shadowing the Inuzuka at the hospital, and Sakura tells him how Tsunade-sama—she calls her shishou—will break her arm in training and tell her to mend it.

“You can heal yourself?” Kiba asks in awe.

Sakura nods like she’s trying not to brag too much, and you let yourself smile. She’s always been bad at modesty but dedicated to the practice. She thinks she needs to be smaller than she is, you think. You thought that would’ve gotten better under Tsunade-sama and Shizune.

“Damn, Sakura,” he whistles and Akamaru, who’s gotten too big now to carry on his head, woofs in agreement.

“Yeah. Perks of training under the greatest medic-nin in history, I guess,” she chirps proudly.

Ah. There’s that lack of modesty you know she was burying under your teaching. You wish you could’ve brought that out in her instead of seeing her as a pinker Rin. You didn’t see Naruto as just a redder Obito, and you killed Obito too. Shizune would tell you to not blame yourself like this for their deaths, but even she couldn’t tell you to not blame yourself for not being a sensei to Sakura.

“God, you women are such a drag,” Shikamaru huffs, “don’t pretend to be humble if you’re just going to brag.”

For that, Sakura whacks him over the head.

“You gotta learn to respect women, Shikamaru,” Kiba tells him, grinning ear to ear.

They’re still just kids. Teenage kids but still kids. You wish you could turn around right now and protect them from the carnage they’re going to see in Kuni. You wish you could wipe their brains of every corpse and every shred of blood they’ve seen since they became shinobi.

You settle for being glad that you haven’t had to wash the blood off of Sakura’s hands before.

**/**

The Great Naruto Bridge is beautiful and depressing all at once. It makes your chest ache, and you think about the hyperactive boy whose hair is almost comical and who eats all your ramen when you take too long and who drinks expired milk like the fool that he is.

Judging from Sakura’s face, she’s thinking the same thing.

“Naruto misses you too,” you say, “all of you… but especially Sakura.”

Sakura grips the straps of her backpack tighter at that. “You spoke to him?” she asks, her voice unusually quiet.

“Jiraiya-sama writes to me sometimes. To let me know Naruto’s okay,” you admit.

She glares at you for that. It’s worse than if she yelled at you.

**Author's Note:**

> chapter 2 will be a lot longer probs so im not sure when i'll be done w it bc i am pretty busy for the next month but hopefully it'll be up soon.
> 
> my tumblr is 3nin if u wanna talk to me abt this au and i love comments so feel free to leave those


End file.
